Sue-Ellen Welfonder - [MacLean 02] (2 page)

And not a one of the countless hours stretching between then and now had dimmed his pain . . . or lessened his guilt.
Be of great heart,
his kinsmen were e’er harping at him.
Move on with his life,
they’d advise. He drew his brows together in a black frown. Of late, even the womenfolk had begun pestering him to take another wife.
Defeat clawing at him, he pressed the back of his hand to his forehead and glanced heavenward. Saints, but he was surrounded by witless, persistent fools, the lot of them unable to see the truth if it perched on their noses and winked at them.
Closing his eyes, he pinched the bridge of his own nose and repressed the urge to throw back his head and howl with cynical laughter.
He knew what his well-meaning clansmen neglected to comprehend.
Iain MacLean, renowned for his hot temper and master of naught, didn’t have a life to get on with.
About the same time, but across the great sweep of the Hebridean Sea, past the rugged coast of the mainland, then deep into the heather hills and green glens of Scotland’s heartland, Lady Madeline Drummond of Abercairn Castle stood within the hospitable walls of a friend’s thatched cottage and braved her own night of turmoil.
The raw edge of her temper spurring her to desperation, she yanked hard on the worn cloth of the voluminous black cloak her common-born friend, Nella of the Marsh, clutched tight against her generous bosom.
“The robe is perfect,” Madeline insisted, and gave another tug. “It will serve my needs well.”
Nella shook her head. “Nay, my lady, I shan’t let you traipse about in rags,” she protested, snatching the mantle from Madeline’s grasp. She tossed it onto the rough-hewn table behind her. “Nor shall I let you traverse the land alone. Your life would be forfeit the moment you stepped from this cottage, and of a surety, long before you neared the first shrine.”
Resting a work-reddened hand atop the threadbare cloak, Nella narrowed shrewd but caring eyes. “Penitents and holy men do not set aside their manly cravings simply because they’ve embarked on a pilgrimage.”
Madeline flicked a speck of unseen dust from her sleeve. “I harbor no illusions about carnal lust. Men’s or women’s,” she returned, fervently wishing the opposite were true.
Her heart ached to revel in the bliss of the unenlightened, longed to be filled with naught weightier than fanciful dreams of a braw man’s bonnie smile.
The sweet magic of his golden words, the sensual promise of his touch.
But rather than a dashing suitor’s seductive caress, his soul-stealing kisses and sweetly whispered endearments, cold shivers tore down her spine. “You needn’t warn me of the darker side of lust,” she said, more to herself than to Nella. “I am full aware of what spurs men to commit black deeds.”
Her shivers now joined by a rash of gooseflesh, Madeline Drummond, reputed to be the loveliest maid in the land, moistened lips yet to part beneath the onslaught of a man’s hot passion.
Lovely
they called her to her face. Madeline sighed, her virginal lips almost quirking with the irony.
She knew what they truly thought of her.
She was no more lovely than any other maid, but she
was
lonely.
The loneliest lass in the Highlands.
Lacing her fingers together to still their trembling, she slanted a quick glance at the nearest window . . . or rather, the crude opening in the wall that passed for one. Square-cut and deep, its view, were she to peer past the alder thicket pressing close to Nella’s cottage, lent ponderous weight to her need to steal across the land cloaked in a postulant’s robes.
“I am no stranger to men’s greed,” she said, another shudder ripping through her, this one streaking clear to her toes.
“Mayhap not,” her friend owned, still guarding the frayed-edged cloak, “but you have been sheltered, my lady. Ne’er have you—”
“Ne’er have I lived,” Madeline finished for her. She blinked, for some of the color of Nella’s cozy cottage seemed to fade before her eyes, the stone-flagged floor seeming to tilt and careen beneath her feet.
Ignoring the dizziness beginning to spiral through her, she jerked her head in the general direction of the atrocities she couldn’t bear to look upon. “My dear Nella, do you not see it is living that shall prove impossible so long as the perpetrator of yon blackness walks this earth?”
A world of objection swam in Nella’s troubled eyes. “Will you not even listen to the dangers?”
“I ken the perils . . . and their consequences.”
Madeline squared her shoulders. Were she not apprised of such things, her friend’s boundless concern spooling through her, pulsing and alive, underscored the validity of Nella’s disquiet.
And the curse Madeline carried with her since birth: the ability to feel the emotions of others.
Not always, and ne’er at will, but often enough. And always unbidden, bubbling up from some unknown depth in her soul to enfold her in the cares and wants of others as swiftly as a sudden mist could blanket the whole of a Highland glen.
It was a dubious talent, which had shown her the true heart of every suitor who’d ever called for her hand but, in truth, sought no more than her father’s wealth and strategic lay of his land.
Clamping her lips together, she swallowed the bitterness rising in her throat and, instead, eyed the pilgrim’s cloak draped across Nella’s well-scrubbed table.
“A man would have to be sightless not to recognize your beauty and station,” her friend declared, following her gaze. “Clothing yourself roughly will scarce make a difference.”
“Not roughly,” Madeline amended. “As a postulant.”
Nella snorted. “I can see you now . . . the fiery and proud Lady of Abercairn seeking the veil.”
“After I’ve done what I must, I will have no recourse but to plead God’s mercy by gifting him with a life of servitude.”
“My faith, lady, if you truly wish to spend your days in a sequestered existence, we can journey directly to the nearest abbey,” Nella suggested, tilting her head to the side. “You’ve no need to traipse from one holy shrine to the next in search of Silver Leg. The gods themselves will smite him.”
Silver Leg.
Sir Bernhard Logie.
By either name, the very mention of Madeline’s nemesis reached a cruel hand through the evening’s quiet to snatch away her hopes and dreams and dash them upon the charred pyres his men had erected before Abercairn’s proud curtain walls.
The crenellated defenses of a stronghold taken only because her father’s worst enemy had stooped to unutterable savageries: the burning of innocents.
One life for each refusal to throw wide the gates.
Compliance came swift, the drawbridge clanking down without delay, but a blameless herd-boy still met a fiery end, the ignoble deed repeated until three of Abercairn’s most vulnerable were no more.
When Silver Leg’s men escorted Madeline’s father, straight-backed and unflinching, to the flames, she’d fled, seeking refuge from the unspeakable at Nella’s door.
Her only sanctuary in a night gone mad.
A simple but good-hearted woman, Nella secured her peace by allowing others to believe she possessed a talent as unique as Madeline’s own, a carefully chosen ability daunting enough to keep most danger well at bay.
Few men claimed a stout enough heart to near the dwelling place of a woman rumored to receive visitations from the dead.
And it was Sir Bernhard Logie Madeline wanted dead. Dubbed Silver Leg for the silver votive offerings, fashioned as legs, that he e’er left at holy shrines in gratitude for some obscure saint’s intervention in healing his child hood lameness, the seasoned warrior knight best known for his lightning changes of allegiance, gave himself a devout man.
Madeline knew better.
She fixed Nella with a determined stare. “The gods and every ravening wolf in the land can do what they will with the man . . . after I’ve avenged my own.”
Nella drew a deep breath, and Madeline could almost see arguments forming on the tip of her friend’s tongue. Thus warned, she spun around before they could grow into full-fledged protestations. “He would have been wise to choose a better cause than to seize Abercairn,” she said, and yanked open the thick-planked door.
Her heart pounded in hot anger as her gaze latched on the distant smoke still curling upward from blackened woodpiles she couldn’t see but felt with every fiber of her being.
“You ken there is a well-honed dirk hidden in my right boot,” she said, her voice tight. “I will not hesitate to use it once I find him.”
Nella joined her in the open doorway. “Then let us be gone before they find you.” She sent a meaningful glance at the evening mist already rolling down the nearby braeside. “Rumors of my witchy ways will only stay them so long.”
A jagged-edged bolt of sorrow, or mayhap regret, shot through Madeline, and she glanced sharply at her friend, but the sensation passed as swiftly as it’d come, and no sign of distress marred Nella’s kindly face.
The wayfarer’s cloak already swirling about her ample form, Nella offered a second, less worn-looking wrap to Madeline. “Can you feel him?” she asked, low-voiced, as Madeline donned the second mantle. “If his malice stirs you at all, we will at least have a lead and won’t waste time journeying in a false direction.”
“I feel . . . ” Madeline began, but trailed off as quickly.
She did sense something, but the darkness closing round her heart held too much poignancy to hail from Bernhard Logie . . . and it came from too great a distance.
“I feel . . . nothing,” she hedged, her chest tight and aching with a stranger’s loneliness and guilt.
A
man’s
loneliness, and of a certainty, not the guilt of a murderer.
’Twas a heart-wrenching guilt far too deep and intimate to be shared with another.
Not even dear Nella.
Cold, black, and laced with a bottomless yearning for vanished days and what-could-have-beens, the man’s anguish seized her very soul. And squeezed so tight she could scarce breathe until his hold on her began ebbing away, slowly retreating to the far-off corner of the land whence it had come.
“You felt nothing, my lady?” Nella’s doubt cut through the residual haze still clouding Madeline’s senses.
“I . . .” Not quite sure
what
had swept through her, Madeline gave off trying to explain and leaned back against the doorjamb, her breaths coming in great ragged gasps.
“And, when he yet lived, I was the good King Robert’s favored lady love,” Nella quipped, peering hard at her. “Truth be told, you’ve gone whiter than new-fallen snow, so don’t be telling me nothing’s touched you.”
Touched her.
That
was the difference—she’d been touched, and deeply. The realization washed over her in a torrent of golden waves, freeing her from the last tenuous threads of the stranger’s powerful grip. She grasped Nella’s strong hands with her own, trembling, ones. “I
did
feel,” she breathed, awed by the depth of the man’s anguish, stunned by the fierceness of his longing.
“And what did you feel?” Nella prodded, giving Madeline’s hands a light squeeze.
Madeline hesitated, not willing to share the stranger’s pain, yet unable to conceal her wonder at the rest.
“Well?” Nella urged again.
“I felt love.”
“
Love?
”
“Aye, love,” Madeline repeated, suddenly quite convinced. The very word sent little tremors tripping across her every nerve ending. “Heart-pounding, thunderous, shake-the-very-earth-beneath-your-feet love.”
The kind she’d dreamed of every night for as long as she could remember.
Shattered dreams, the remnants of which she’d cast to the four winds the instant she’d slipped into Nella’s way faring cloak.
Murderesses didn’t deserve to know passion, and nuns weren’t allowed.
In his own far-off corner of the land, Iain MacLean stood amidst the chaos of Baldoon’s great hall, his back bone steeled against the unpleasant awareness that every saint worth his wings must now be frowning upon him in fits of fine, feathered fury.
Assorted fragments of his deepest needs, all his longings and best-kept secrets, weighted his broad shoulders as surely as the billowing clouds of smoke still pouring from the ruined chapel swirled around him in a choking mantle of black reproach.
Bile thick in his throat, he struggled to ignore the seething frustration gnawing on his innards. A vein still throbbed wildly in his left temple, and his heartbeat pounded in his ears with such furor, he could scarce hear the pandemonium unfolding all around him.
Not that hearing the ruckus would tell him aught he didn’t know.
The shameful aftermath of his carelessness stood carved on his conscience. Indelibly and, without doubt, dancing already on the flapping tongues of every prattle-monger in the Isles.
His jaw clenching, he drew a hand down over his face.
One fit of blind rage, an accidentally toppled candelabrum, and all hellfire had erupted, its jeering demons clamping sharp-taloned hands around his ravaged soul in a foretaste of the damnation awaiting him.
Blinking against the sting of smoke, he drew a great heaving breath and tried not to cough. If the good saints possessed a shred of mercy, they’d let the raging inferno in Baldoon’s chapel claim him as well.
Unfortunately, much to his vexation, his brother, Don-all the Bold, much-revered laird of the great Clan MacLean, had other plans.
Every inch as tall as Iain, and of the same impressive build and dark good looks, Donall MacLean aimed an assessing glance at the smoke-clogged chapel . . . and at the grim-faced warriors gathering ever nearer. Trusted kinsmen, well accustomed to Iain’s quick-tindered blood and how swiftly sparks ignited between the two brothers who resembled each other so closely that those meeting them for the first time oft mistook them for twins.
Keenly attuned to their laird’s wishes, a near imperceptible nod of Donall the Bold’s raven-haired head was all the encouragement the loyal fighting men needed to form a tight, semicircular cordon behind him.
An impenetrable barrier between Iain and the fire licking its way up the chapel walls.
His handsome face set in bitter earnest lines, Donall MacLean whipped out his steel with the loud
zing
only the most lethal of blades can produce.
He aimed its deadly tip at Iain’s middle. “Do not even think of going back in there,” he warned, his dark-eyed gaze hard as ice-frosted stone, his deep voice equally cold. And so annoyingly contained, Iain’s temper blazed all the more hotly.
Irritation pumping through his veins, he met his older brother’s cool gaze with his heated one. “You think to stay me by the edge of your sword? Our own father’s brand?”